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Just finished a chat with a guy I know who flies the 737MAX in the U.S. he's adamant Boeing made no mention of MCAS on the training he was involved in and can't find much of anything about it in the manuals although he is still looking. Whichever, it is certainly not flagged.

My personal opinion would be that I don't want a system that decides it knows better if an aircraft I am flying is stalling AND takes it into its own hands to correct what it believes is stall onset.

Stall warning horns have been around forever, stick shakers for a long while, those alert the plot, not take over. A shaker will, if the crew do not respond, engage a stick pusher, but the pilot still has feedback and can over-ride.

Both are kinda difficult to ignore although the pilot of the now long ago Papa India crash at Heathrow did just that and put his Trident into an unrecoverable deep stall.

THAT was pilot error, more pilot stupidity, but he ignored warnings rather than the aircraft erroneously taking control as seems to be the case with Lion Air. What is most telling is that the sensor for the MCAS is a single unit, there is no parallel input to enable a comparison of a seeming stall approaching. That's unusual, most systems do not rely on solo inputs, in fact on an airliner I can't think of one, airspeed, angle of attack, altitude etc, all duplex or even triplicated. (a single sensor is what is being reported, I don't have a manual to hand myself.)

Too early to say but Boeing and the FAA seem to have passed a system that if it receives incorrect input has too much authority from too little verified input.

Cheers

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Recent news, that plane should not have been flying but it somehow got passed safe to fly. With faults reported last few flights, looks like economics trumped safety. I cannot blame the pilots, they knew they fly deathtraps.

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Recent news, that plane should not have been flying but it somehow got passed safe to fly. With faults reported last few flights, looks like economics trumped safety. I cannot blame the pilots, they knew they fly deathtraps.

In most of the flying world, including Indonesia, I've seen them doing it, the pilots do a walk around, looking for un-removed flags etc then if happy they sign off the 'plane as fit to fly, including a review of the maintenance logs.

That's where trust comes in - the pilots can't check everything, so they have to rely on maintenance actually having been done.

There are of course cockpit indicators to verify systems ore ok but blown bulbs/leds have happened with subsequent consequences.

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So there was storm stuff approaching us from over the mountains... then something happened and it veered off towards Kuranda and gave them hail ...lol. Kuranda is not any where near Brisbane or anywhere near south of Rockhampton even ...just so's you know

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Yet another day wasted fucking with computers: BSOD caused a few things to no longer work with file corruptions, so I'm not sure I could easily get away from a windows refresh type reinstall. But then the next 3 or 4 hrs trying to fix what I thought was a corrupted profile, because the hotkeys you use in file explorer to change the view had changed, lead me to wiping my cloud-saved sync profile and rebuilding my desktop profile 3 times while testing... only to realise the hotkeys changed because I told a fresh install of windows on a laptop to use Australian English as the display language. Ugh.

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Still if you break out the elements of a browser the rendering engine is the real guts, the rest is connectivity and GUI plus logs for history etc.

Win10 updates biggest problem that I've seen is that it just keeps needing a larger and larger footprint if you don't cull it and even then it has grown but many, many users who have it, on new machines where it is pre-installed, would have no idea in that regard - just all well drives are big enough to deal with it.

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Windows Refresh IMO is a bit of a joke, it takes longer than a reinstall - only advantage being that user files and store apps can be left in place (not traditional "programs" though).

Given you might be starting out with a corrupt install it's a bit dubious.

Out of curiosity I tried on a freshly installed VM and it takes 3 times as long as just running the fresh install - of course in the real world there can be savings had when you consider stuff like hunting down drivers and doing the save/restore of user files.

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The last few boxes with a fresh win10 install have been ~14gb. That seems ok to me, even if it is for many reasons a long way from the install size of, say, Win95.

Refresh took longer, I think, because it goes through and manually prunes the guts out of program files, as well as backing up user profiles before cloning them with less fluff.

I have a network stash of every program and driver I need when reinstalling, for any machine I've done it on more than once, so that's not that big a deal, even if they're not particularly up to date at the time. It's the small things I hate, like having to reimport all of your account and server settings into Outlook, or waiting forever for cloud drives to hash local data to make sure nothing needs downloading, when local data is ~100gb or so.

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PMSL - the Playstation Classic which is selling for $149 is just a cheap ARM based board with a bunch of EOL support hardware with a total BOM that's probably under $40, and running a public domain PS1 emulator.

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PMSL - the Playstation Classic which is selling for $149 is just a cheap ARM based board with a bunch of EOL support hardware with a total BOM that's probably under $40, and running a public domain PS1 emulator.

IKR. But I assume it'll be like the Nintendo classic rereleases, and people throw money to the wind in the name of nostalgia.

12 hours ago, Jeruselem said:

It's pretty powerful ... if you can put up the anally long commands you have to use

Not really a problem for me. Was moreso frustrated because in the time it took me to learn how to use hashtables, and find some functions other people made to pull exif data and hash strings instead of whole files, Idid it by hand in lightroom.

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Yeah - 95% of sales will go to the nostalgia crowd and those who don't realise that you can easily emulate the thing with a cheap phone and that most of the games practically fall out of trees.

I saw a 20 game Atari 2600 joystick for $20 in the Reject Shop the other day - tempting but I already spent $55 on the C64 in a stick about 10 years ago and it's had maybe a couple of hours worth of use.